Content area
Full Text
Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012.
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman's book Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race offers a compelling and original look at the way sexual and racial identifications and representations have been mutually constitutive in American literature. Abdur- Rahman's book "advances a new architecture of race in which race operates as erotics" while also advancing a tropology of "transgressive sexuality . . . [challenging] popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture" (3). Finding good company with recent black queer studies texts like Sharon P. Holland's The Erotic Life of Racism (2012) and Darieck Scott's Extravagant Abjection (2010), Against the Closet embraces an increasingly popular epistemology wherein blackness is often regarded as queer.
However, Abdur-Rahman's book differs from other black queer studies texts in key ways: it does not claim to address "black" and "queer" identity values in equal measure, favoring African American literature as its point of inquiry; it offers a critical genealogy of queer racialisms rather than "simply historicizing" them (5); and, most conspicuously, Abdur-Rahman offers the word "queer" as a term synonymous with "transgressive " or "regressive" sexuality (14). Through methods drawn from "African-American studies, psychoanalysis, sociology, queer theory, and gender studies," Against the Closet engages with four main areas of inquiry: African American slave narratives, gang rape and lynching, the role of desire in mid-twentieth-century political fiction, and the incest trope in narratives featuring young black girls. In each, Abdur-Rahman shows change over time in the tropologies she constructs, making her areas of inquiry and their linkages purposeful in understanding something like a history of black queer representation.
In her introduction-which is direct, but sometimes overly telegraphed-Abdur-Rahman places her work with works of African American critique that, through interdisciplinarity, focus on the power of abjection (157). Much like Robert Reid-Pharr's Once You Go Black (2007), Against the Closet seeks to redefine the "agency and autonomy" of radical sexual acts and bodies (4). Abdur-Rahman, in a way consistent with a traditional mode of queer theory, locates the queer subject of her book in transgression, as well as in "social (and sometimes sexual) margins, throwing into crisis and into...